On October 6, the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Francis Halzen, a theoretical physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his role in developing a massive observatory to detect ghostly cosmic particles called high-energy neutrinos.
These electrically neutral and nearly massless particles constantly whiz through space, although they seldom interact with ordinary matter, which makes up stuff we can see like planets and people. In fact, roughly 100 trillion zip through your body per second. Neutrinos with low energies are produced by everyday astrophysical phenomena, such as nuclear fusion in the sun.